“Great career combined with genuine work life balance (provided you're in upstream) ”

Comp & Benefits

Work/Life Balance

Senior Management

Culture & Values

Career Opportunities

Current Employee - Engineer in Houston, TX

Current Employee - Engineer in Houston, TX

I have been working at Chevron full-time (more than 5 years)

Pros

Good solid company to work for with a lot of opportunity to grow. Pleasant work environment and I get to work with many bright and motivated people. The management style is also very good in their way of engaging employees and always having an open door policy where you can walk in anytime to let them know what's going - and when the news is bad they don't shoot the messenger.

Genuine work-life balance. They respect employees right to a personal life and there's seldom a need to have to work on weekends or late at night. The nine day fortnight system is a fantastic benefit. Pay & benefits are good, probably are some higher paying employers around but when you look at the whole deal (esp working hours etc) I think you'd battle to beat Chevron

Cons

All of what I wrote for the pros are about my time working for Upstream. Previously I worked in Downstream at a refinery and it's like working for a different company. Effectively zero career progression and some unpleasant office politics. Probably the worst was the policy of never promoting top level managers from within - always had to be expats or someone recruited from outside of Chevron. Understandably this upset a lot of people who realised there was no chance of ever moving up. Compensation sub par (especially for some technical skills that local management was not aware that they had or even need!) compared to competitors - although in fairness the work life balance was good.

Advice to ManagementAdvice

For Upstream - you're doing well and have some good people that are well managed. Keep up the good work. A lot of people are envious when I tell them I work for Chevron and ask me if there are any openings. For an oil & gas company it does seem to be doing pretty well regarding public image and perception.

For Downstream - recommend improving the quality of management and relooking at some existing policies. I've heard the complaint from my new managers in upstream that the traditional feeder system of engineers starting at refineries and then after around 5-8 years moving into the big upstream projects is no longer working because engineers seldom last more then 4 years at refineries before they resign (2 years is around average) Refineries are a great breeding ground to develop engineers that will in future support the big upstream projects, but you need to retain them especially as the need for guys with "plant" experience increases.

The forced ranking system that you use is outdated is not taken very seriously by staff. Managers also hate having to do it. Most staff know they will come out as average and don't put the maximum effort into career development because the result is a foregone conclusion. Your performance review system is due for an overhaul.